RTS has a SCALE problem
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2024
- Your mighty world-conquering army consists of a dozen shiny dudes on horses and 50 peasants with pointed sticks. The between mission cinematics show shield walls 10 ranks deep and 100 wide but when the game engine loads you could fit your entire force on a double-decker bus. How does this make any sense? Well it doesn't, as RTS has a problem representing scale.
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00:00 Opening
00:40 Examples
02:17 Wars are Big
03:45 Small Engagements
06:44 The Solution?
08:50 Exceptions
09:29 Conclusion and Outro
Battle of Irun Image By Unknown author - commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Spanish Civil War Map Image By FDRMRZUSA - Own work== CORRECTED ALIGNMENT KEY COLORS-MAP COLORS from this source: File:Guerra Civil Española.svg., CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
All footage is either recorded by me or taken from official game trailers or demo reels. Images are either my own, AI generated, Free and Royalty-Free Stock or from Wikipedia. Backing Music is from the CZcams creator audio library. The script is my own work, and the voice over is me. - Hry
Normally I manage to respond to most comments, but I'm not used to this level of attention so here's a bit of a clarification as I could have probably been clearer in the video:
- I still love these games and play them all the time. I tend to critique and comment on stuff I like rather than tear into stuff I hate.
- The numbers of units normally found in RTS games are normally sensible. My rough point was that the setting/narrative of the game should try and match the numbers you do get to work with, or each single controllable "unit" should be a better visual representation of the size of force it is trying to represent. I've no desire to try and control thousands of units in a game!
- Thanks for all of the game suggestions, there are a lot I've not heard of and I'll be trying out as many of those as I can
- Whatever you thought of the video, thanks for watching. I really appreciate your time.
In response to you @7:20. There is a game that may peak your interest in the smaller scale RTS Genre called War Mongrals where you command a small squad of Polish Resistance. I would check the game out as it has been passionately made by a polish studio using actuall historical references and such. There is another game by a Czech studio about the Czechoslovakian Legion as they make their way across civil war torn Russia. I would check these games out if I was you.
I believe you may like this one rts game called Empires of the Undergrowth because you’re controlling a ant colony.
Wargame does the best job imo of scale and control. But it has a learning cliff to play.
RTS as a genre is not about simulation of warfare. Rather it simulates turn based wargames on tabletop in real time. Or as Fallout Tactics calls it "CTB, continuous turn based." RTS is like speed chess with 0.1 seconds allowed to think per turn. So it makes sense of these conventions of space and time. Chess had similar levels of abstraction and representation as RTS has now. Just with a lot more computing power attached.
Waterloo was such a good movie. They used actual soldiers from the Soviet Red Army to give the battle a true sense of scale.
Spot on, and even 54 years later with all of the power of Hollywood CGI nothing has ever looked as impressive as that film.
The cavalry charge is par none.
Starcraft II's scale works very well in Wings of Liberty, where the fighting force represents a small group of insurgents attempting to infiltrate backwater bases and steal artifacts.
It doesn't work at all in Heart of the Swarm, where the fighting force represents the largest brood of an interstellar swarm attempting to conquer entire planets.
But it suffers from another type of scale: why is a battle cruiser the size of 8 marines? And how can marines damage that thing.
@@keineangabe1804 Starcraft2 real scale baby.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Does real scale also change up the damage formula? A marine should not be able to damage a battleship under any circumstance, or even an Ultralisk, which are like 16 meter tall behemoths with carapace plating harder than tank armor.
@@luka188 Real scale does indeed change the damage formula, bio is no viable.
@@luka188Giant Grant Games has a series playing through it. It's quite silly. It makes me appreciate what they chose to do in the original game... Although I do like seeing Ultralisks get the awesome scale upgrade.
If we're gonna argue scale in RTS, we also have to argue that tanks and fortifications aren't built in mere minutes either. RTS for the most part is a weird one because it sits right at the game-y end of the spectrum of games. Any dilution of what RTS games are now or what they were 30 years ago will be seen by fans of the genre to be a dilution towards what's labelled "real time tactics" in some corners too, they aren't the most easily pleased of people.
Sadly a lot of RTS devs aren't looking to the left or the right of them and seeing improvements in controls and interface that are being made in some titles which would lend themselves to dealing with larger masses of units even in smaller scale games, too.
The only really weird part to me is when it comes to firepower. Like when a bunch of upgraded marines take down a mothership - which is supposedly a city-sized spaceship. What!?
It's not a problem when you've been playing a game for a while, but as a beginner, it's easy to fall into the trap of being very timid or overly aggressive with your units because you have no intuition about how powerful the enemy units actually are.
That's a great point, scale mismatches are especially hard on new players and spectators.
I really hate to be that like nerdy guy BUT I’ll just say it, I’m pretty sure those upgrades make the ammo like capable of shredding walls or ceilings of their enemies like mini-artillery, so like if they aim for the main part or vulnerable part of the target it’ll just like collapse
There is a real scale custom map in the SC2 arcade. Marines become tiny and Motherships and Leviathans fill up almost the entire screen. Uhm, I i think they are actually bigger then one screen. It has been a while.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece They're massive, infantry get slaughtered, you need dedicated anti-capital ship units to even hope to take them out.
there's the real scale mod where the mothership is actually to scale, as are all other units, it really changes up the feel of the game
I'm surprised no one has mentioned *World In Conflict* yet as an example of "one unit of soldiers is actually an entire squad". As far as I remember, it also tailors the scale of its campaign & narrative to mostly fit this scale: you're not a general fighting an entire war, you're a lieutenant fighting the _"highlights reel"_ of the most key moments of a few important battles of the war.
i.e. The entire world is in flames, but you're not a world savior; you never singlehandedly turn back the Soviet invasion of America or win the war for Russia. You're just the tip of the spear, going where the fighting is thickest in a few key moments, like the opening salvos of the war _(the first Soviet mission where you lead the Spetsnaz infiltrating Berlin, then the first tanks crossing the Berlin Wall)_ or a last-ditch defence _(the American mission where you dig in at Cascade Falls to protect the secret of Star Wars/the SDI)._ You're just a small cog in a broader war machine, fighting often just to allow others to fight _(e.g. destroying air defences so the bombers can swoop in so the troops can land so the _*_real_*_ invasion can finally start; or fighting to completely destroy your own forces, just to buy some time for the _*_real_*_ defenders to dig in)._
Hell, the Soviet campaign has a mission where you fight American insurgents in the countryside... not because the battle in the cornfields is big or important, but precisely because it's *not.* Because it's typical and tells you a lot about how the war is going. That's something the story vignettes are especially excellent at: zooming in on the conversations your soldiers are having with their loved ones, not about The War, but how the war is impacting them. Not a picture of the Great or the Glorious, but a picture of a father trying to tell his kids he'll come home. Or a picture of Private Snuffy getting stuck in paperwork hell & arguing over the phone with a pay clerk about his *need* to pay alimony to his ex-wife, goddammit. Small, simple things, valuable precisely because they're small & simple. Exactly what you were talking about.
(If you can't tell, I think about the game often. It's such a good game, with so much to take away from it.)
God I love World In Conflict. Best nukes I've ever experienced in a game. I heard Broken Arrow is the closest thing currently out there trying to approach the WIC experience
It really needed a sequel. I got the collector's edition that came with a piece of the Berlin Wall!
Unfortunately, Massive Entertainment didn't fill out their 451-A in triplicate, so funding was never released.
Would seriously recommend "regiments" if you liked world in conflict, its awesome and single player based.
Dawn of War had most infantry as squads. When they took damage you'd lose members of the squad. You could also sometimes add units and special units to a squad.
That game had some seriously good features indeed.
But it had same issue with some factions. Space Marines - fine, each of them if almost like a light tank in lore and worth dozens or even hundreds of guardsmen. But Imperial Guards? According to lore they are sent to some battles even in millions. If squad of Space Marines can have around 10 individuals, then full squad of Guardsmen should have at least 100 or 500 or more.
@@OldSkullSoldier Well there are also technical limitations to consider here, rendering that many units would have been extremely tasking
Star Wars: Empire at War did the same. Each "unit" you had was actually at a platoon at the infantry level, except for elites like heroes and stuff. Commanders had their bodyguards and stuff.
@@runakovacs4759 Good to know, i was considering it and Dawn of War (i bought the latter), when i get the chance i'll look into Empire at War as well.
the scale thing isent a problem but a sollution.
The angry mob of C&C generals actually was a field test for C&C triberium wars. In that game every unit is a squad of up to 8 soldiers.
This became the meta for almost all RTS games after 2008 with the notable exception of SC 2. Sadly RTS died out before this concept could expand.
CA did it wayyyy before them in their Totalwar game.
It is doable. Nothing new. Though it might not be appropriate with the compression of RTS game.
Other games like Ground Control and its series from ME, which came out in 2000, also did it better when it comes to unit ability and micro management. It even has more engaging story.
ME has another game call World in Conflict, which has better distant compression over all.
It didn't die out
Iron Harvest uses it for its infantry, to push the scale up to mighty mechs
The reason I mentioned the Angry Mob was it does't feel the same as other squad-based games. In the COH, DOW, Iron Harvest etc it feels like a handful of soldiers grouped together (like a squad in 40k tabletop) but the angry mob feels a lot more like a single controllable"model on the same "base" to carry on with the tabletop analogy.
@@kaluventhebritish Because the angry mob actually is special. It "heals" itself by attracting new people. It contains 3 different weapons (stone, molotov and gun) that are fired at different paces and efficiencies. In C&C most units actually have a precision (they can miss shots) but due to game play this precision is very high (like 99 % of shots hit), the mob is an exception and will often miss.
When you order it to move a very long distance one of the people will actually die (if you manage to split the mob into two groups one part of the mob will also die, this is not this effect. This effect implies that one of those villagers didn't made the journey).
At the same time you can not use tunnel networks, meaning the mob is the only unit that can't rapidly move and is "stuck" when you want to travel to islands.
All this makes the mob a very odd unit. It basically handles like an amorphous blob.
Which might be the reason you do not see such units too often. They are super hard to balance.
The mob is balanced due to the vulnerability to every anti-infantry weapon. It is essentially the unit with the lowest resistance in the game. But if those where regular troops? Well, check out the C&C Generals mod "Shockwave". The infantry general can build squad units. Which is absolutely devastating.
I reason that it was the passion project of a talented programmer. For it is considerable less bugy than many other things in the game (looking at you path finding).
Which is my second suspicion. I reason that the core problem (besides the balancing) is the formula.
During C&C Generals they still tried out new stuff. However not much stuff. The path planing for example was as shitty as it always was and ever will be (even tough some moders have shown that you can actually do good path planing).
Nobody is touching many aspects of a game, because ... well ... it is too important. You sit at one game for years now. To expensive to try out new stuff.
In the 90s dev cycles where a few months. There experiments where possible. But now?
Take Battle for Middle-earth and Dawn of War. They also had both squad based combat. Here they streamlined the concept. Squads share the same abilities. They use abilities in unity. And their number is basically a health meter and damage modifier. Same business as usual.
I remember Halo Wars having the basic units as a squad, rather than just one guy you found in the basement. Didn't apply to larger ones like tanks, but at least everything was relatively to scale for what part you were doing and in the actual size of the unit models.
Star Wars: Empire at War also did this, with the basic units being a squad, but each unit of regular troops you called in consisted of four squads, which helped sell the idea of this being a full scale invasion, albeit only visually seeing a relatively small part.
As did Dawn of War back in 2004; and, curiously enough, if you max out your infantry pop (as space marines) with normal marines you've got 80 guys, add on some vehicles and commanders, and you're at or around the canonical 100-man company.
@@eruantien9932 There is also ROTK's more recent games. It's become more like a middle ground between the older titles and the Total War games. Note true RTS, but it's pretty damn close.
You have generals and armies assembled and the generals are commanded to lead their army into battle. Their numbers dwindle as they take damage and the units reflect this. It's not just one army you are commanding, you are commanding multiple smaller armies on a large battlefield like it often happened on the battlefield of that era.
The scale is much larger too. I remember only being able to max out my invasion force in ROTK III to about 250,000 troops split up among maybe 12 generals a d I actually managed to get info a battle where my troops lasted 4 months in game fighting an equally large force of and I only ever achieved this half a million man battlefield once into the years of gameplay I soaked into that game.
Now the newer ones let me easily exceed that number. I have no problem sending 1 million troops and the generals necessary for a widescale war with individual battles I can command on a tactical level while the map version just has a numbers game go down based on stats and general's skills and equipment.
Yeah, battle for middle earth games did let you control squads of units rather then singular units (except for the hero units.) Now it was still scaled down a lot from the epic battles in the lords of the rings movies which was the source of the inspiration. But I like the system. And in the end it about selling the fantasy in an engaging way. Not to be 100% accurate.
Beyond this, the Wargame Real Time Tactics games and any games that draw inspiration from them also use squads of soldiers. In these games you do not control massive armies but fight smaller engagements. They feel a lot more like they're trying to get scale right. But these games are also a lot more focused on giving you a realistic feel.
A tank is basically a squad. Four tanks is a platoon for a reason.
For star craft one they specifically title you as a captain, executor, and cerebrate. These are smaller scale leaders so you having only so many forces under your command is pretty reasonable.
Yea realisticly the guy at the top doesnt control any units, he does pure strategy and decides where the campagne is gona go.
Starcraft originally also had much lower numbers in lore. Only 2 known Zerg broods exceeded the million in estimated numbers, with some being just a few thousand strong. Chau Sara, the world that was wiped out just before the start of the game and kickstarts the whole plot, had a Terran population of less than half a million.
Starcraft 2 distorted the whole sense of scale and casually threw the word 'billions' around.
To be honest that scale problem doesn't bother me. I can easily accept the "symbolism" of my forces within my suspension of disbelief.
Initially I thought that this would be a video about the physical scale of RTS, the size of buildings, maps, units and more importantly - the range of their weapons. Even in a futuristic game like Starcraft even the units with the greatest range fight an almost melee combat. One can accurately throw a stone farther than a marine shoots. But a realistic range of weapons would make RTS games unplayable, so my discussion is pointless. :-)
Not pointless at all, I think the ranges are an interesting topic. Kinda wish I had thought of that before and put it in the video 😃
@@kaluventhebritish You can steal that idea and make the next video about it.
How to fit into an RTS game a fact that for any artillery 1 km is basically a point blank range? :-)
I cant accept an entire company ducking behind a single fence.
@@poiuyt9751km is borderline danger close for most artillery -- hell, it _is_ danger close for large naval and rocket artillery.
@@mage3690 Yes, that's what I was talking about.
Homeworld Cataclysm seems to fit the scale. Instead of controlling a planetary army you are in charge of a small rag tag mining fleet trying to oppose the monster by hoping here and there in the background searching for a solution, while the real armies fighting the bulk of the war. It is also mentioned that a huge ships(except for the command ship) are only manned by dozens people tops due to the lack of overall manpower mentioned in the lore
Battle for Middle Earth works like you described at the 8 min mark, as well as Cossacks.
for cossacks i cant only see the two :p
Thats also what came to my mind.
I think BFME really brought that concept into the mainstream.
It was also the first time large units felt really satisfying.
The problem is mostly that we talking about a game.
If you want Scale you can get SupCom or Ashes of Singularity.
But this is the thing, the more you have to do the more you have to do.
if you have pop cap limit 1000 units in SupCom, you need to control those 1000 units.
I get your point but this is just limitations of our brains for games and our hardware.
Its why Total War will get 20 cards of 160 dudes max, but go to FoG or Pike and Shot and now you can get easly get 20k armies more if you do the scale up... but the game part is the same, if your "Pikeman" has 1000 dudes or 4x that, for the game ist not different
Beyond All Reason deserves a mention, along with Planetary Annihilation.
@@JinKee I don't like PA that much, BAR and TA are not that big scale wise because of how the economy works
@@JinKee zero-k as well, if you're going to mention total annihilation successors
SupCom also has its own issue with scale - scale is NOT limited because resources are not limited and the unit cap, if one exists, is very high. As such, if you can't deal with that sort of scale, you wind up out of your depth fairly quickly - the AI *can* handle that scale, so if you can't, you lose.
@@ronnycook3569 PVP
Not exactly an RTS but the game Valkyria Chronicles adresses some of those issues: It mostly delves with the characters in the unit you command (Squad 7) and their stories, and shows them as simply a smaller (albeit extremely competent) unit in the larger picture.
Valkyria Chronicles is really its own unique kind of gameplay as a turn-based squad level tactics game with real time combat when you control a character (that used to have the enemies shoot faster if you ran it at 60fps, lol). But you're right it does solve the scale issue for those smaller fights by specifically saying they're smaller fights. The times when the fight gets bigger, the story says that your squad is a part of a larger force and that you're just looking at one section of the overall battlefield in particular.
It's a type of game I've not seen replicated anywhere else though things like Phoenix Point did include an aiming mechanic for their individual units.
Your also through the series have to stop your own current mission to help the core military to stop them from being over runed by emery.
Scale must be limited because 1 person cant control 500 or 1000 units in an RTS like Starcraft. Something like Total War is what you're after. Having entire companies of infantry be 1 unit you can control means it's actually possible to control them.
If I play to much total war I start dreaming that I am more than one person
@@benlewis4241 hahaha "I am my unit!"
Cossacks can muster up to 10,000 units for each player. Still underwhelming for a Napoleonic war army, but hey, it's close.
Edit:
Planetary Annihilation also has no limit I thing. You can swarm an entire planet with your own army.
Yeah the Annihilation games do well here, both from the fact that their have no fixed limits and also aren't trying to represent anything close to known reality, so you don't have that disconnect between "what you already know" and "what you see on the screen".
American Conquest as well, i think it was made by the same guys that made Cossacks.
@@Lowco5 Twas! They released Cossaks 3 one point, hope they get back to RTS after the war.
"Close Combat: A bridge Too Far." An entire game series all about pretty much this. VERY detailed. (The game actually tracked individual peoples ammo.) But also had an entire section devoted to supporting Operation Market Garden in one of the games. It had breadth AND depth. Very under-rated game.
It did a good job of holding scale. Your job was to hold this town square. Like 5-20 buildings. With resources and consequences to match on the more global operation.
Combat mission series just looks so much better and thats not a high bar to climb.
They are both great series, with Combat Mission having the best single scenario battles I've seen, but Close Combat has some amazing campaign stuff going on, where the battle lines shift between engagments, and the terrain becomes more desolate as the 2 forces grind each other to a pulp over the course of several days on a single map.
What you are describing is the aspect of abstraction in command in control, scale, tactics, logistics in these games. These abstractians have been imposed on the tabletop as much as on the screen by limitations in the ammount of miniatures and cpu power aswell as the understanding of the people playing it. If you had looked carefully, you would have found good examples of good scaling in RTS like the Wargame series, Warno or Close Combat series for example. Sadly you fail to adress two points that if you play wargames/tabletop, you should be familiar. First the representation of scale is often referenced in rules as "System XY is a company level wargame, where 1 soldier represents 1 soldier" and so on. This might change if you change the system by alot, where as a single canon can represent a whole baterry in a 6mm Napoleon wargame rules. On the other side, you often have more personal and skirmish oriented games, and also platoon (CoH) level games. The more you focus on the individuall soldiers, the more you lose on the side of scale. Secondly, even the 3rd edition rulebook of Warhammer 40k (a by now dated source to be fair) is addressing the fact, that all engagments in Warhammer 40.k will be much larger, than what the players and the table can ammount in scale, so you are to see that engagment as the focal point of it, where the heros clash and the battle is decided. Now, with modern hardware as in 3d printers for tabletop wargames as much as cpus I can have grand battles all I want, but that only adresses a point you have glanced at already. A common person doesnt understand the inner workings and may find it frustrating to see a delay in units taking and executing orders, what in reality would just be the way of an order getting passed down or people taking time to assesing and making decisions. If you would have introduced this into CnC Tiberium Dawn, the game might have been more realistic, but it wouldnt have worked as well for the broader mass. Just as an M1 Abrams struggling in any way with soldiers in the open doesnt make sense. It is merely another imposion for more casual gamers to understand and participate in a game, as many people that saw how you play Warno or Wargame for example, being zoomed out, ordering around Icons more than models of units dont find it appealing. I would suggest you make another video about the Army General mode of Warno, as it depicts military campaigns from afar (as in moving different battlegroups) in a turn based strategic layer, and then fighting out tactical battles. It also has as much realisim as a game can take imo, before starting to be a simulation and not a game anymore, with loses persisting during a campaign, as reinforcments are not likely to arrive in short order during an engagment of mere days. You cant "build" new units, it will just be more regiments arriving during the campaign and every tank blown up, every jet shot down, will be missing in your next battle. I like that you adressed this topic, because it is interessting to talk about, but find you are lacking a more refined look unto it, and would wish you remedy this in your next video.
Best comment of this video.
Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars has troopers in squad and vehicles alone. Dawn of War also has the squads, but the squad sizes are small and the amounts are small as well. The most foot slogging soldiers you can have is 200 if I remember correctly (10 squads, each with 10 soldiers). Imperial Guard could have a couple of advisors joining the squads but it doesn't change the amounts that much.
If mods count then you could use the Dawn of War Ultimate Apocalypse mod. You can get a lot of troops in then, the Guard get Conscripts which have a squad size of up to 25 I think, and you get 5 of them and they don't count to your squad cap. Just so many dudes, well unless the game engine dies cause it was never intended to handle it! XD
No, you have an RTS problem. You're looking at a 1995, isometric PC game and asking why it doesn't have a true to life scale...
The earliest RTS games were incredibly hard to play due to the low resolution. I remember trying to play the original Warcraft and it was difficult, you get to see so very little of what's going on at any one given time due to the computing power of systems at the time and the monitors.
IMHO, the bigger issues tend to be the way that the damage scales and the limit way in which things can block projectiles in most RTSes.
Newer rts games have this issue too. Iron Harvest is a wicked fun 1920+ dieselpunk rts but you only end up with a couple of squads with a couple of mechs. I want to lead armies! Not rabbles!
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I mean, doesn't citing resolution limitations of decades-old games kind of make my point?
Thanks I guess.
You didn't watch the video. They litterly say "game limitations" lol
The game Warno does scale better. You are commanding battalions of soldiers, with the smallest unit being a squad of infantry or one tank
Scaling is completely wrong in Warno. If you measure it, tanks fly at 300+ kph across the map
Steel division 2 gives much better sense of scale with more realistic speeds
@@tedarcher9120later cold war engines are something
Try Regiments! Its like Warno but single player focused (and better imo)
it boils down to people wanting to micro the little mans, player autocracy, the feeling of individual control. even in games which claim that scale you aren't giving commands down the chain but microing little mans with the appearance of being zoomed out.
In the original Command and Conquer game and Red Alert, it was stated somewhere that it actually is an abstract representation of what's going on. C&C Renegade actually made this blatant when it shows a shot from Tiberium Dawn and then zooms into the screen to reveal the area in full 3D where the scale of everything is completely different to what's on screen.
I do think there is a way to have your cake and eat it too with this issue. A really simple idea is to imply or outright state the player's rank is much small than an actual general, while simultaneously establishing there are many other captains and commanding figures in addition to the player. There's small hints of something like that in Dawn of War II or even Red Alert 3. This is of course assuming you want your game to have the full blown war-between-empires scenario going on. Honestly considering that subject matter has been done hundreds of times before I think I prefer your suggestions of just basing an RTS around a scenario that doesn't involve end-of-the-world scenarios with world spanning armies slugging it out.
A very old and very obscure RTS that represented a single unit with entire squads was, funnily enough, a small scale RTS called Empire of the Ants. Battle for Middle Earth also did this, which as far as I can tell was made by the same team who did Generals.
I think that's really the only functional way of doing it. It gets annoying having to clip through terrain to see what's going on, and having a single soldier on the same map as a much larger vehicle can lead to the soldiers being incredibly hard to spot or the larger vehicles being so large as to block a lot of what's going on.
I hadn't noticed that bit in the manual for C&C, but I've always just ignored the weird scaling as just a practical limitation of trying to display this stuff on a monitor.
The scale actually is a solution to making the game playable for a lot of people. Who the fuck wants to micro 1000's of troops at the same time. It causes more lag more ai pathing issues and just makes your screen bloat with units everywhere.
Having played RTS games since just about the beginning Warcraft 2 was the first one I played, the ability to manage large numbers of troops has increased greatly, that's something that could be handled with filters and groups, but really, I don't think that it would really add much to the fun unless you're targeting some hardcore war game geeks that really care about the specific ins and outs of Napoleonic strategy versus the ones employed during the World Wars versus what was going on with strategy in the Crimean war versus the US Civil War.
The only game that comes to my mind about infantry being groups instead of unit is Rise of Nations. They made infantryman come in trios and lose members as the group lost life.
If you want proper scale of engagements and where a company is actually a company you might want to take a look at the Combat Mission series.
Edit: But these are more a tactical simulator, than aclassical RTS
Wow im surprised someone mentioned combat mission. I think the biggest problem is that OP wants realism/authenticity out of games that are more arcadey than they are trying to be realistic/authentic. If you want realism, you need to play a game thats trying to be realistic like combat mission or even graviteam tactics.
@@MRrealmadridRaul I thought i bring it up, because i enjoyed RTS in my youth, but i also was bothered by the scale of engagements and hit points and CM has scratched that itch for me (havent tried Graviteam Tactics). But in the end i usually Play smaller scale plt+ or coy+ max
@@AR-GuidesAndMore Graviteam tactics has a way better engine but isn't as good as combat mission. The combat mission engine is really old and I wish combat mission used the graviteam tactics engine.
One RTS i can think of where units are composed of multiple soldiers in formation is Praetorians. The scale is still small since you control few units and they aren't huge, but combat in formations with the importance of flanking, maneuverability and morale was pretty cool.
The note about games with infantry units grouped up made me think of 2 examples. Rise of Nations for one, but there it's usually 3 units per squad. Another is Empire at War, which as a whole is more of a hybrid like Total War, but skirmish mode plays as an RTS. There infantry unit sizes can be varied (especially if playing mods), but a whole unit consists usually of 4 squads of 9, so that's similar to the mentioned scale.
8:20 - There was a game series in the 2000s called "take command" and I had the "take control: 2nd Manassas" which featured full scale armies in the American civil war. It was fully RTS but not a base builder and you'd control regements all the way up to an army of 6 divisions around 60k men (graphics were rough as the enemy also had that many) with exact numbers of men and you'd have to dispatch signals or runners to communicate orders.
I remember it being pretty difficult at the higher levels of control because as a corps or army commander it was impossible to control everything as some units or commanders were slow to obey or were too overzealous and would advance into exposed positions just like in real life.
Thr point about a unit being a group of soldiers and the health bar being represented by the number of men in the unit might be from the dawn of war games, and with gameplay upgrades you could expand the number of soldiers within a unit and give them specialised weapons for focusing on enemy armour or infantry, so your units can be given specialized roles
Reminds me old game called Original War where you can command only couple of soldiers, even participating in large battles.
Hearts of Iron gets a the macro scale right but then it also makes you manage a lot more than just combat.
The scale is still off. WW2 had 80 million casulaties, in HOI4 its rare to reach 8.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 That's because the developers have a strict ban on any mention of the, um, less savory aspects of WW2. Even with mods, it's an instant ban.
@redknight6077 HOI2 had scenario modes, which would put you in a campaign and would most of the time, limit your ability to build, trade and research. It was much more focused in it's execution, something I wish HOI4 brought back.
@@cf3714 No it doesnt. The vanilla game gives fascists the occupation policy brutal opression. Also if we ignore civilian deaths there are still like 30 million military deaths in WW2, and you just cant reach this number in HoI4 despite the fact that there are no POWs and encircled units are effectively deaths. I think the main reason for the smaller scale is actually that HoI4 doesnt have a trained reserve system, countries like the USSR would conscript all men for 3 years and train them, then release them back to civilian life and in event of war they could deploy without training all the cohorts they had previously trained, they just might be a bit rusty from being trained 10 to 20 years ago. Without the ability to deploy half trained units by the 100s of divisions and needing to train divisions for months before deployment the armies are smaller and the players are a lot more cautios they wont launch historically accurate frontal attacks with the entire army to push the enemy back but will try to manuver a few tanks arround go get some encirclements.
@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I was referring to a specific word of WW2 that starts with a G. You can check their website if you think I'm lying for some reason. Same goes for biological wf, interment camps, and mentions of the big H.
@@cf3714 And I was reffering to the armies being a 10 of their historic size.
I would disagree with the scale being a problem. While not realistic, they serve well as an abstraction, even if not a representation.
When you think of the kind of experience an rts player looks for, commanding an army partaking in a heroic battle, would more realistic scale really help? I mean battles were fought for days, we can't expect the player to be so dedicated to play a single match for that long. Nor having simulated arguments with logistical about the lacking of cookies recently hampering morale.
As long as you can do envelopment, faint retreats, counter the enemy's formations and all the tactical jazz, while running an economy and investing in developments for the war efforts. Whether it's accurate doesn't really matter, as long as it's impact, is proportional to what it would be, if it were accurate.
When you were talking about the angry mob and couldn't remember which game had units represented by a group of people, the answer was partly staring you in the face. Battle for Middle Earth, wich uses a newer version of the same engine that was used for Generals has all units consisting of multiple people. Larger creatures may consist of a smaller group, while even larger ones like trolls or siege engines are a single unit.
He didn't even have to go that far. The next game in the C&C lineup, tib wars, did the same thing with infantry. Other than engineers and commandos, all infantry work in groups of 2-8 soldiers. I think the mob was partly to test how that system worked out.
Battle For Middle Earth 2 was a step in the right direction, you deal with regiments of infantry instead of individuals outside of some elite units
BFME1 had this too, but the supply limit was really small. Good for micromanagement tho, can't imagine myself doing that with 10 times that much units.
Steel Division (and other wargame likes) is the biggest culprit for this. You'll have a front like 20 miles long, and you'll have like 40 guys per mile. Still fun tho
Thing is that it’s actually very realistic, a tank troop IRL (4 tanks) needs about 6-8km of width to operate effectivly
The modern battlefield is extremly empty if you want realism
That'd be an entirely believable scale, WG: RD with its obvious horseshit like what the planes do, is very plausible in the brigade size fights with the integrated artillery and the air units and the amount of people you actually command.
accept 10v10 in steel division 2
you get 6 - 10 guy's including armored vehicles at the start of the game and then they get instantly wiped out by either artillery, a phase king tiger or some aircraft
then you got to wait actual minutes in order to get enough points to put out a sizable force that will get wiped out anyway if your team dosnt have air superiority with an unrealistic number of over powered flack canon's, not even as anti tank weapons just the towed aaa that out ranges everything before 1944 unless it is an artillery piece in witch it will just be taken out by the 20 or so heavy artillery pieces that the enemy team just has with much better accuracy then yours ever could achieve due one of the main faction's, the soviets lacking any form of radio's in their army outside artillery spotters that take up allocation points that could be spent on actual recon instead
The Dark Ages was full of really really small battles where whole kingdoms were decided by about a hundred warriors on either side. I'm amazed it's never been a setting for that many RTSes.
for so long i've wanted an RTS game that has each level of control, but you can pass controls of the smaller stuff to an AI to handel. so you may only have a battalion, but you can give the AI a company or two and tell it to defend the western edge of the village, and it'll do all the organisation. or be a general in charge of an entire front, telling entire army groups to move around, kind of like hoi4, but you can still zoom in and watch the AI micromanage on the scale of something like CTA ostfront. though something like that probably won't come out until i'm 40 lol.
C&C 3 did the "(almost) all infantry work in squads" thing, but the main example that comes to my mind is blitzkrieg. It focused on much smaller parts of larger battles, had persistent units that gained experience and could be upgraded into newer vehicles, and infantry worked as full squads. They even gave each individual soldier in the squad a specific weapon, based on typical squads from that period of the war. Different soldiers had different abilities, or were able to engage different targets.
Infantry was useless in blitzkrieg tho. Artillery and tanks won all battles and infantry when sent to battle just died.
@@mikemandalorian9226 On offence, yes. Infantry did ok at holding positions, esp in buildings. They also were better for reconnaissance. Ultimately, though, that was fairly realistic. Infantry without armour and artillery support, won't get very far attacking an entrenched enemy. On the flip side, infantry are notoriously hard to kill when dug into fortified or urban areas. In-game, though, I mainly used them for capturing enemy guns, and used the snipers to scout for my artillery. I found even tanks could be a bit iffy going on the offensive in blitzkreig, as a single hidden AT gun or tank could take my elite unit out.
Regiments (a Cold War wargame by one developer) has you control, well; a regiment that consist of platoons of tanks or infantry with their vehicles or even duos of helicopters. It's honestly gives a nice sense of scale
Woo 'nother regiments fan! Can't wait for the DLC
Combat mission's larger scenarios are great for showing the scale of an enegagment but is limited to set scenarios tabletop style
I agree, i love and still play combat mission games because of the realistic scale of engagements. The older games used to have 3 soldiers to represent squads but the newer games scale and represent every unit.
Tre Supreme Commander.
You will like the scale 😂
8:28 COMMAND AND CONQUER 3: TIBERIUM WARS!
Something that reaches closer to the scale of medieval battles would be Battle for Middle Earth. Each unit you made was a "battalion" of 10-30 guys who marched in formation. So you end up making twice the magnitude of individual soldiers as you would in a game like Age of Empires.
The buildings were also scaled relatively well, but again you never had tens of thousands of uruks attacking Helsm Deep. More like tens of hundreds.
There was an RTS once upon a time that take this point and says: "Well, we give the players the opportunity to make BIG armies like in the real armies of XVII and XVIII centuries". His name was "Cossacks - Euroean Wars". It give you the opportunuty to put on groun until 60'000 single units for map. It was... hard and marvelous, and it gave birth to a series of similar games, like the unforgettable (and hard as hell) "American Conquest": same history, bus set in XVI from XVIII Americas instead of Europe.
Sadly, "Cossacks II - napoleonic wars" (which is a VERY good title) reduces this scale a littile bit, to a more normal-like RTS scale. And Cossacks III was praticaly a modern remastered of the first title. So... if we want a real-scale RTS title we are too stuck with this old titles from the golden age of RTS. Nowdays i didin't find anyting BIG like those... (Sorry for the mess in the language - I try to improve my english, but is hard. Great video!)
Even my favorite turn based strategy game Heroes of Might and Magic III runs in to this when you think about it. Looking at all the aestetic and weakly recruits from a town and hero speed Ive come to the conclusion that every adventure map tile is a square kilometer, but that means that armies cant be larger than a legion in size cos on the march a legion would strech out to 3 kilomters long while the hero and his army occupies only 1 map tile, in battle the frontage cant be more than kilomter either further coraborated by big creatures like behemoths and dragons taking up 2 battle tiles rather 1 battle tile as say pikemen. Most of the maps and campagnes are fine with this scale, telling the story of a hero or 2 leading an army or 2 on 1 specific mission, I just finished A Thief in the Night where an elven ranger general with a 100ish sharpshooters and a few dragons attacks a single vampire lords estate a few days from the border to recover a seamingly minor artifact the Vial of Lifeblood. The scale only fails in the OG campagne - The Restoration of Erathia - when troublings news reaches her about her fathers kingdom queen Cathrine returning from Jadame to Antagarich lands with a couple 100 troops when in reality shed need to land with 10s of thousands if shes to rally remaining resistance of the Erathian Empire to repell the necromancers of Deja and overlords of Nighon who have killed the king and taken the capitol but are unable to occupy the human empire do to how big it is.
Oh yea the biggest adventure map size is 252 by 252, smallest is 36 by 36. You just cant show Erathia on an ingame map, you can only show a province, or half a province and the border with another polity. Some of the OG campagne actually does this nicely with the swamp dwellers deciding to capitalize on Erathias moment of weakness to take over the border lands and youre granted the task of securing a few towns in your sector.
Kingdoms and Castles uses the unit as squad technique where when they take damage, soldiers die
I deal with this by imagining that there is an entire larger battle going on at the same time, and mine is just an elite group tasked with dealing with strategically important objectives, accomplishing which has small but necessary effects on the rest of the war's efforts.
Chess has a scale problem.
How?
Dustin Browder: StarCraft is still a game, where large armies fight against large armies
Game: Psi limit exceeded
Maybe in 20-30 years we will have computers powerful enough to have a true grand strategy game.
In the late 90's I remember thinking to myself "man the battles are going to be huge in RTS games in the future now computers are getting more powerful". Instead we got the opposite sadly.
Old RTS games were limited by the hardware available when they were made, one unit represents many, that sort of thing became the foundation that even new games are building on, even though we could ramp up the scale now with better hardware, we don't because it changes the gameplay that players expect. The oldest turn based strategy games make it more clear, you click on one unit, tell it to attack another, and you get a little animation of many units firing and hitting many others.
Even more recent games are still hamstrung by the pathmaking algorithms. It's certainly gotten a lot better, but a thousand units needing to pathfind across a map is always going to take a lot of resources, and/or a lot of smart design.
Wargame Red Dragon - the minimum unit is a group of soldiers and the health of that unit is giving by the number of soldiers.
star wars Empire at War had infantry units of 9, which was entirely necessary when you expect them to roam against a AT-AT.
having a limitation in RTSs kind of makes sense in one respect though (despite being unrealistic) and that is computing power. If there are too many individuals on the screen it can cause a game to lag and possibly even cause problems. Cossaks 3 is a perfect example of this... there is basically no limitation to the size of your army as long as you have housing of course. You can make huge armies with thousands of soldiers, but this like I said earlier can cause a great deal of lag unless you kill off some troops on the map. An addition to this... units start walking through water and getting stuck.
Frankly, being able to field almost half a whole company at a given moment seems like a pretty decent win for CoH. Especially since it lets you infinitely reconstitute squads way faster than you'd be getting actual replacements.
the game you forgot is probably world in conflict
If I remember, World in Conflict did a fairly decent job at conveying scale
The problem is that you don't reliably know what kind of scale you can provide, until the game is mostly finished.
Total War needs a very different simulation then C&C. Different levels of detail per unit. Different kinds of detail you can provide (like, how could you ever make Morale a effect in a C&C game?).
And whatever scale you are aiming for, it might not be technically possibled (see the failure of Planetary Annihililation to provide large planets in multi-planet scenarios).
I think that's less of a concern now than it was in the past. You can just 3d model all the assets and scale them as appropriate. The main issue there is that smaller units you may over detail, but if you leave them for last, people are probably not going to notice.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade You think I am talking about model sizes?
Idk this has never really bothered me, nor do I consider it a problem. Mostly because of the reasons you list here, not in spite of them. And, like you pointed out, if the sense of scale is more important than the feeling of involvement that most RTS go for, there are games that do that. They just... dont mix well imo.
Lotr battle for middle earth, works like you mentioned.
When a unit is upgraded, more people appear in the same one .
There are a few games which may fit into your category of where you build units in a larger war. The one series that comes to mind most clearly for me is Cossacks and especially Cossacks 2. In those, you are recruiting individual soldiers, which you form into companies, and (iirc) there is a unit limit of something like 72K per battle (in Cossacks 2). I still remember learning how properly devastating grapeshot is from Cossacks 2. It still had base-building, but the full-on battles were great.
Edit: The unit limit in Cossacks 2 was actually 64K.
I think an interesting example for an RTS-ish game with convincing scale is Last Train Home. In case you missed it, it's a game about the Czechoslovak Legion on their way to Vladivostok. The Czechoslovak Legion was formed by the Russian Empire along with a promise to create a Czechoslovak state if they win the war, which did come true, but now Russia descended into a civil war, and with other newly independent states refusing to let them pass, they instead had to fight their way east, along the Transsibirian railroad, in order to evacuate through Vladivostok and travel back to Europe by boat. In the game, you are the commander of a train filled with such soldiers, commanding, at times, a few dozen soldiers at best, however, i think the scale works. Firstofall, it is never implied that you command the entire legion. You're commanding a single train, fighting its way across a war torn Russia in an effort to get as many soldiers home as possible. Secondly, the battles usually take place over woodlands or street blocks, and you have a clear objective, say, disabling an artillery position that has set up along the railway you're on and is about to shred your train if you don't, or you have to clear out the local train station from red soldiers to allow safe passage for your train. Oh yeah, and the game is also extremely atmospheric.
Manor Lords RTS component seems like it fits the bill. You're not some vast kingdom, in fact you're subordinate to the kingdom you're in. You only have a small army because you're only defending your settlement against local rivals, you can send your troops on campaign for the king's favour but that happens off screen. In fact I'd argue a lot of city builders with combat elements represent this pretty well, like Stronghold Crusader and even the old impressions city builders like Pharaoh. The scale makes a bit more sense because you're not an army defending a nation but a garrison defending that particular city.
I see all the things I wanted to mention were already posted in other comments. As for where you might have seen groups of ~20 soldiers being commanded as one unit before: have you perchance played the Impressions city builder games? Because army units in all their games as far as I know worked like this.
Maybe the issue, or at least one of them, lies in that the role we tend to be put into as a strategic player is "the commander" of all forces. Ironically, Commander is a specific navy rank rather than a army or marine rank designation, though in both of them it's a generic term of someone in charge of an operation, large or small. Just as a side note.
Indeed, if one is the commander of all the nations forces that you happen to play as, then if there has to be realism to the game as well, you have to play it in the style of Hearts of Iron or the like and be the biggest picture kind of leader. However, in most RTS games you are seemingly in the role of anything between a Lieutenant to a Colonel in effect, depending on the level of responsibility (read, stage in the game) you have reached. Many times, the size of the map reflects your overall command responsibility as well.
Trouble is, it seems most developers tend to think that anything less than the big shot rank is not desirable and would make the players feel like "meh, I'm not feeling important or that I make an impact in the story/campaign", which would lead to less sales of the game down the line. In essence, you are given the uniform of a General but are still out in the field like a Captain or Lieutenant. The "best" of both worlds so to speak. The rank and pomp of brass with the grit of the soldier level combatants... well, near enough.
I'm not saying that the first batches of games like these did things wrong, they were the pioneers of the genre after all and technical limitations of the time prevented even the advanced mindset to grow and produce such games we're theorizing here. But since then we've made advancements and progressed in both technology, programming and idea spawning that we are rapidly approaching the point where scaling will more accurately reflect real life, in those games where one plays for realism and historical accuracy that is. And provided that the presentation of your role is truer to life than yesterday's games.
The truest to life I've seen so far in the scale of C&C like gameplay is the Company of Heroes series of games. You're not in the shoes of Eisenhower or anyone like that, but more or less in the shoes of a Colonel or Major in the field. At times unnamed or even unacknowledged as an entity entirely, others you are in the role of someone specific for the campaign storyline, or heavily implied to be anyway. The scale fits much better here in terms of realism of command structure and characteristics in live combat, not in grand strategy. Sure you're not getting the entire Company or Battalion to work with but you're still essentially playing skirmishes and missions of a scale that is still close to the real life confrontations that put together made for one larger battle on a General's map table.
The only thing missing is the facet of being able to partake in combat as someone of those ranks may need to do in more dire circumstances. I'm thinking something closer to Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and similar games, for when you need to fight with your troops as opposed to being an armchair commander, or even a lone wolf type of soldier in most war games such as the Battlefield series of games. Battlefield, as an example, does promote teamwork but it does not adhere strictly to military discipline and teamwork like soldiers would do in real life. Brothers in Arms, however, makes this a requirement for a proper playthrough, even though we're talking about AI teammates.
But then, it would stop being a RTS and become something different. A hybrid game. There are those kinds of games out there and they may even be on the rise and will see more sophistication in their implementation of both RTS elements and FPS/squad based warfare. Now the question is only what one's preference is. Pure RTS gameplay? FPS gameplay? Or a balanced yet believable mix of both?
The only thing left for the hybrid games is to tackle the problem of making things have the quality of Pure FPS graphics and mechanics while on foot with your fellow fighters as well as have the scale and flow of a RTS game with little to no loss of graphics, control or other qualities found in either genre.
Speaking of scaling, another game that implements the "participating in a larger war" aspect very well, even though it is only represented in statistics mostly, is Helldivers 2. Here your missions are added into a pool/progress bar of contribution that is filled with completed missions of the entire Helldivers 2 gaming community, as long as said community were partaking in missions of the same planet you were on.
Sadly, there is little in visual representation on the planet or even galaxy until after each campaign, set by the game regularly, is completed (accomplished or not, with results accordingly). Despite my personal wishes for certain visual representations, it is still a great touch I wish we saw more of and given the game's popularity we may yet see more of this approach in other games. I certainly will smile broadly if we see this in more games of both RTS, FPS and especially hybrid games.
I wanted to reply to this since you put so much effort into your comment so sorry I've been slow - I'm normally get few hundred views and a handful of comments so this video caught me off guard! However, you do make some valid points. One thing I would like to add to the mix is Total Annihilation - not because you can have more units, but because you as "The Commander" are actually represented on the battlefield and have to do a bit of the fighting when the going gets tough like you mentioned. In regards to RTS/FPS mix I think the Natural Selection games handled this perfectly - the team leader with an RTS view could get out of the Command Chair and fight with FPS if the game depended on it - but things were probably already going pretty bad if it got to that point!
@@kaluventhebritish Thanks for replying. I do know of Supreme Commander, heck I even own and have played it quite a bit. I did consider mentioning it, but I decided not to, simply because the act of commanding what is essentially yourself on the battlefield isn't what I call realistic, which was the core of the video and commentary down here. Along with scaling, which is realism-adjacent as far as I observe. Commanding yourself is functionally the same as commanding a mission critical unit, such as a commando in special campaign missions in Command & Conquer. Losing the unit, the commando or yourself, means mission over for obvious reasons, but it still is too similar in my opinion to be worthy of special mention even if a unit is supposedly yourself. In Supreme Commander, you're basically a commando commander. A "commandor" ^^
Scaling wise the game went further than pretty much any game of its time, and is still popular even today in the form of "Forged Alliance Forever", which is a fan-supported online multiplayer mod for the standalone expansion to Supreme Commander. Sadly even this game is starting to feel its age some, yet the replayability of the game still seems to hold pretty well. Why? That one we could make many valid arguments about. Suffice to say, they did things right with the game. It's a staple for how to make a strategy game of its class. All they really should do for sequel games or games that are spiritual successors to it should still implement all or at least most of the aspects that made it such a success.
What would need to be improved, I think, is the scaling. It was fine for its time, but it could be even greater today. Imagine maps that are five times as big, with about the same amount of players. Then we're talking a game that truly approaches the entire of a command structure. A near theater of war level gameplay going down to the individual units or squads in local skirmishes. Where Company of Heroes had you be a Major or such, C&C had you be, supposedly, a micromanaging general and Hearts of Iron had you be essentially a leader of the caliber of Eisenhower or Irwin Rommel, this game's scale that I'm postulating would encompass nearly all of these ranks purely on scale.
The only part I can't see being feasibly implemented is FPS combat. The scale would be too large for it at present.
Haven't played the Natural Selection games, but that sounds interesting. Reminds me of old school Battlefield 2 Commander role. The problem with that game, and I presume NS had the same problem at times, was the unruly players that would do their own thing regardless of your commands. The individuality of people prevents a satisfying level of control as a designated commander in a game such as that. Of course, dedicated players (most likely a group of friends who are fans of the game) could and would get close to an effective combat force in that respect but in online strangers-with-strangers multiplayer this is a mixed bag. Which is why I think a hybrid game of RTS with FPS elements that has you control AI units (with or without morale or fear elements programmed in like in Company of Heroes) would be quite enjoyable in multiplayer matches.
In order to effectively command your troops in a FPS setting you could try to implement some kind of quick select and order feature. If you have played Tom Clancy's Endwar you can select a unit and have it go to a certain area/flag to attack and try to capture it. Something like that for quick selection and order would be nice for FPS mode. You would have a list of available units based on class (and unit production buildings if the game's setting is such as well) and you could give relatively simple commands this way. But when you have the opportunity to enter into a more dedicated command mode you can give more detailed orders on a map like in CoH or C&C.
If I'm not mistaken, there actually is a game in the making currently that might do something very much like this. It's called Silica. Check it out!
Anyway. That's my take on that. Again, thanks for the response.
I think Dawn of War 2 does it well, as the Space Marines usually fight long, protracted battles. They drop from the sky and hit were it hurts, then disappear before their enemy can react. They leave the mop-up to the Astra Militarum.
The game you might be thinking of where units were multiple soldiers who each could be killed could have been the "Close Combat" series. I played a lot of Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far on my first Windows PC. Units could be a single guy for a sniper, three or so guys for a recon team, or (I think) a max of seven for a full infantry squad. Each guy in the squad has his own HP, morale, secondary weapons (from AT weapons down to pistols), and weapon types (so you could have BAR gunner in a squad of troops with Garands or Carbines). In that game you were commanding something ranging from a platoon to a company with a few assorted support weapons or tanks and the battles were scaled appropriately. You were leading the company taking a bridge or the heights commanding a road junction; although you were in theory commanding the whole division because you could be fighting several battles in sequence on different maps (with persistent damage) all part of that day's operations.
Your solution reminds me of how Men of War actually manages to thrive in the small "lone operative behind enemy lines" scale, specially with its inventory system.
It would be interesting to see more games focus on the small, "squad trying to survive" scale.
Thinking about it, I'm being reminded of Earth Defense Force, and how that series manages to drive the point home that while you've won your fight, you're just a little spot in the whole planet, and everywhere else is being devastated and razed. It does a pretty good job at separating story from gameplay, as the story is basically just a radio drama - and I think that's the issue, RTS games just lack that "command chatter" that provides the proper sense of scale. They just never really talk about what's happening OUTSIDE your battle. It's always all about you and your glorious conquest of the 5 houses of London, and you get to hear about how the resistance in X place is doing.
Very few things beat finishing a hard fight against tough enemies, only to hear through radio chatter how your buddies over in the next town are being killed and how things are going to get worse.
Great video! Thank you! Also, talking about scale, there's currently this game called Silica, which is in early access and looks very promising and the sense of scale is very nicely delivered. At the moment of this comment, the RTS aspect and others are still not fleshed out but it surely looks really nice.
Scale is an inherent problem with most RTS game due to the real time aspect of it.
Scale is not as big of an issue with TBS because it is not real time, the game can take its time to run the calculations, the units don't have to be animated, your units can be abstracted platoons of soldiers.
I suppose an RTS game can have you controlling a platoon of soldiers as a single unit and you can move multiple units around as you wish.
But then a game like that will feel weird with the scaling because a real battle takes time, the commanding officer does not control the soldiers directly, there's always a time lag from sending out the command to each platoon receiving the command and carrying that command out.
There's an inertia to scale after all and this inertia doesn't mix well with real time.
And in my opinion, that would be the most fitting answer to why the RTS genre has a scale issue.
I think the Cossacks series are the example of properly scaled RTS, consistent with setting and all. The only argument against it I can find is housing, which also acts like unit cap
This reminds me of recent Mechwarrior 5 mission, were a squad of assaults (big hulking mechs) was ditched by mercenaries and their light/medium mechs. Big bulky mechs were shredded and defeated (same happens in Mechwarrior Online). Small mechs swarm the big one, and no amount of weapons will allow you to rotate fast enough to hit enemy target.
But what happens in gameplay is that you take 4 assaults by yourself and shred all of the enemies, no matter their size. Game becomes just vertical progression.
Then the developers need to think of the gameplay Light, Medium and Heavy mechs could be used.
And you end up with different story and gameplay.
What do you think of Star Wars: Empire at War?
Halo Wars has individual units with squads as the smallest scale unit. But I don't think it's the RTS you're thinking of
The game engine is the largest limitation, they can only do so much scale before the game can no longer run.
I always found Sins of a Solar Empire to have a pretty nice scale for being a space RTS. Both in manpower and material scale.
I think manor lords does very well with focusing on a scale so small that the "traditional" 100~200 units feels about right. While a city builder, the RTS elements are cool.
I think the Wargame Franchise does scale pretty well, as well as implementing mechanics for modern combat in an engaging way. The franchise has a spiritual successor coming out soon called Broken Arrow. But admittedly, these games play very differently from your traditional RTS.
My favorite RTS are Warhammer 40,000 ones, and when playing Space Marines the scale makes more sense - the Black Library books do describe epic, drawn out Space Marine battles with like 20 guys on either side.
Dawn of War III also does this lovely fighting in the background, where you can see a lot of skirmishes taking place just outside the playable part of the map. Gives the whole thing a great feeling of scale, there's war all around.
I guess something to this effect could be said about StarCraft too, where I don't think we have a lot of established long form lore, but it's possible to draw parallels (especially since SC was inspired by WH40 tabletop).
I agree that when it comes to historically based games, it's mostly stupid. Not just RTS, there's the Sniper Elite series where a singular guy dismantles the entirety of Germany, stuff like that.
i liked how world in conflict handled scale, this was more multiplayer focused and you were only supposed to handle a very limited number of at the game start specified part of the army. you could controll like 6 tanks at max or 6 helicopters, or 4 mlrs systems or sam systems. This game had some different problems, for example you got points for capturing targets and destroying enemies and you could reinvest these points into various types of strikes that were not deflectable. so despite controlling the support commander and having a sam system does not allow you to shoot down enemy air planes and artillery shooting from outside the map was also a constant threat you could not counter.
For games that do scale properly you could look to the combat mission series, which are tactical level combat simulators that have the player command units (instead of individual soldiers) in combat actions at sizes as small as a platoon to as big as a battalion (or two if you decide to use really cheap units) per side. It's a very niche series of games since they go to great lengths to simulate command and control, the spread of information between units, spotting, morale and it's effects, calling for fire missions like artillery and CAS, etc.
The games series has entries all over mid to late WW2, as well as more modern fictional scenarios (some more fictional than others).
It may be rather close to the Hybrid style as Total War, but the Ultimate General games have quite a bit in terms of scale and command. Some issues being though a regiment of 500 men compared to a 1500 man regiment looks the same size but its done in a way that keeps the aesthetic of large blocks of men duking it out over a vast battlefield.
I think Star Wars Empire at War does the thing where your unit loses men as it takes damage. The issue is that unmodded, there is a stiff limit on ground units. The space battles however are closer to the battles of the comics and books (still smaller than the grand finale battles of the movies though) and can feature multiple capital ships, support craft, and dozens of fighter wings.
I remember i use to think each engagement in a map was a battle in C&C.
I hate to say it, but at the end of the video, you might be referrring to Cuban Missile Crisis? The story (post nuclear war) makes the fact that you have very few units reasonable and infantry is controlled in groups with single soldiers in that group dying
Unfortunatly, that does't make CMC a good game, trust me, I'd know
Battlecruisers are supposed to be larger than the entire map. They have thousands of workers which are basically marines. Yet somehow a couple marines can shoot it down.
They also take only slightly linger to build than a marine and they cost as much as like a couple tanks.
Imagine combining every aircraft carrier together and then having it be worth the same as about 2 m1 abrhams tanks. And they take about the same time to make.
The loss of a single aircraft carrier is a monumental tragedy and severe threat to global coverage of military presence. Battlecruisers go down easier than like civilian cars.
The StarCraft nova dlc has you go into buildings for some missions. Sometimes the buildings also contain buildings inside wtf. How does a bunker fit inside a Command center.
Sometimes there’s even like Battlecruisers inside these buildings which again imagine going to like even a Walmart sized building and there’s a 4 city block sized battleship taking up only a small portion of the store to the point that your can easily lose sight of it.
In some missions you literally build ON the battlecruiser. Or it just drops buildings for lore and gameplay reasons. So its not entirely clear how many command centers and supply depots they have stocked up to drop when needed but they have to exist on board somehow. And then we get back to a Battlecruiser inside a command center and the Battlecruiser itself contains multiple command centers.
Also how big is a starport so that it can manufacture a unit that itself can hold a starport.
Theres absolutely no way an known material scaled up to battlecruiser size could enter orbit without crumbling and crashing immediately especially with that hammer head design and how the exterior is almost entirely glass because every single room needs to have a space window
Protoss units I also thought were limited so it seems odd how disposable they kind of are in game. You don’t build these units or buildings you just warp them in from the home planet. So why don’t they keep their upgrades from previous missions they were in?
One really has to have some nerve to talk about scale in RTS and not even *mention* the Cossacks franchise...
hey does shogun 2/total war games suffer from this?
because in playing i think they capture the scale of combat of their respective genres well
He said that total war doesn’t count, since it’s not a classic RTS style game.
But yes, they do capture the scale of battles quite well. Giving you command of entire companies, and batteries.
They are short in most battles. Biggest armies you can control are 2-4k men, which is an order of magnitude short of the larger battles of the period.
I remember Battle for Middle Earth using squads of infantry and cavalry - the first one were still smaller units, but the sequel pumped them up considerably to be gangs of like 20 per unit. It still had a pop cap though so even going ham you wouldn't have more than a few hundred men, which made some sense for elves and dwarves but not for orcs or Men. I on a gameplay level preferred the smaller scale of the first game, but it was definitely immersion-breaking to be defending Helm's Deep with like 30 guys against an "impossibly large uruk-hai army" of like 200.
I agree with most of this, but I do think that space battles are a bit of a different story. Considering naval battles (which space battles mimic) are fought by a relatively small number of individual ships, but are crewed by larger numbers of people. Having a battle group of 10-30 ships wouldn't be terribly unrealistic. Considering a US carrier strike group only consists of 6-10 fighting ships, it's a relatively realistic scale. That then lets the player focus more on the management of each ship, even automating some systems. Strike fighters could be launched from the carrier and given direct or more broad orders, and carriers could deploy defensive interceptors that defend the fleet. Frigates and cruisers are launching their long range armaments until they close in with each other and start knife fighting. And you can control it as much or as little as you need or want.
If you want a more realistic approach. The RTS series, "Close Combat" was FAR ahead of anything else I've ever seen. You're orders were far less directly followed and could even be ignored. Units could get tired, run low on/out of ammo, panic, and flee.
The thing is: it's not just rts games that hwve this issue: in Fire Emblem specifically, there were dedicated missions inside buildings that may have taken up a single square tile worth of space, but now it is the size of (almost) the entire map, which is just ridiculous.
If you have to train up every unit in a couple of factories, building a BCT is going to take a bit too long.
There is one game that you forgot to mention that I believe gives a much better representation of scale of battles, or at least, is able to do so in scenario missions: Cossacs. Sure, you still have a max of about 200 soldiers in a single unit (and a max of 10k/32k/64k per map), but it goes a long way to show how massive the armies of the time could be.
The idea of representing a group of soldiers as a single entity reminds me of Final Liberation, which was the PC version of Epic Warhammer 40,000.
Of course, Final Liberation was not real time, but turn based.
In physical table top war games, Flames Of War follows the same pattern:
A single "miniature" is either one vehicle or a team of about 3-6 infantrymen.
A "unit" in a platoon (2-5 vehicles or (5-7 infantry teams).
And your entire strike force represents one company with attached support units.